2017 Investor Services Survey

Welcome to the Investor Services Survey produced by R&M Surveys.

INTRODUCTION
This page presents an extract from the 25th annual edition of the R&M Survey, measuring customer satisfaction by means of questionnaires completed by a wide range of institutions around the world.

RESULTS
This extract presents the two main tables from the survey. The first depicts those providers qualifying in at least three of four geographic regions. The table is headed by Pictet.

The Experts' Ranking reflects scores given by fund managers who deal with multiple relationships and therefore have a good basis on which to compare service levels. BNY Mellon takes pride of place, with a surprising fall for HSBC from top to bottom position.

METHODOLOGY
The R & M GlobalCustody.net Survey measures customer satisfaction by means of questionnaires completed by a wide range of institutions around the world, being those involved in using the services of global custodians. The 2014 survey collected 769 responses.

To qualify for the survey, a global custodian's business must cover at least five countries of investment in addition to the country or countries where the global custodian and client are domiciled, but it need not serve clients based in more than one country or geographical region. It must attain at least 15 responses from third party investment managers dealing with more than three global custodians. A response from an investment manager within an organisation associated with or related to a global custodian is only allowed if that investment manager also submits responses for at least three of the third party custodians that appeared in the previous year's survey.

Historically, due to the geographical location of respondents, the survey has been split among North America, the UK, continental Europe and the Rest of the World's respondents -- and qualification in at least three of these four has been a prerequisite to qualify in the overall rankings. With a growing spread of responses worldwide, results are now broken out into the Americas, Europe/Middle East/Africa and Asia Pacific.

The minimum criteria for a global custodian to be included in the survey results for a geographical region is to have 15 responses (reduced to five for 'Rest of the World' and Asia Pacific). To qualify for the overall worldwide rankings, the global custodian must have a sufficiently-broad geographcal footprint of responses, per above.

Ranking methodology entails respondents rating their counterparties using a scale of 1 to 7 (seven being excellent and one being
unacceptable) across 48 separate service elements, grouped into 12 broad service categories, across securities services and
treasury services. The service elements include technology, reporting, settlement, safekeeping, income collection, tax reclamation,
securities lending, foreign exchange, cash management and fees.

In addition to analysing the results by geography, the survey considers different client types. Firstly, there is a focus on investment managers, with some distinction between External (i.e. investment managers who are investing / managing funds on behalf of others), Internal (i.e. a Family Office or Inhouse Pension Fund), Bank (who uses a global custodian to process their client's custody business) and third party relationships
(i.e. those investment managers acting for an institutional investor who appointed and pays the custodian). Secondly, the focus is on pension funds/foundations/charities/others.

THE FULL REPORT
The full survey write-up is a must-have for institutional investors, fund managers and other users of securities services, together with service providers and other industry participants. It drills down to performance in different geographies and examines client satisfaction among various client types.

As well as more than 20 results tables, the full survey report contains much analysis and comment, together with individual bank profiles. There is also a detailed examination of each of 55 separate service elements - showing each provider's score against the industry average, thus highlighting strengths and weaknesses.